Chimera: Hosts to Other Species

In Greek mythology, the Chimera was a fire-breathing hybrid creature with parts from more than one animal (imagine a creature with the body of a goat, dragon wings, and a lion head). In the scientific world, animal hybrids are called "chimeric" and receive their name from this mythical creature, but unlike their namesake, exist in reality. One area of research involving the use of chimeric animals has the ultimate goal of growing human organs in these animals, and then transplanting them into humans.

While this research is still very young, several studies of chimeric mice, rats, and pigs, suggest that using one organism to grow an organ of another species, is a viable method for curing disease. One particular study published in Nature, showed that mouse pancreases could be grown in rats. The healthy insulin-producing cells from the mouse pancreases were extracted from the chimeric rats, and transplanted into diabetic mice, which cured the mice of diabetes. The transplanted cells allowed the mice to maintain normal blood sugar for more than a year, giving scientists much hope for the future of this research.

In another study, pig embryos were injected with human stem cells, with the hope of using pigs to grow human organs for disease treatment. Unfortunately, the researchers found that the human cells likely interfered with normal pig development, since only a small percentage of the pig embryos were capable of continuing development for about 28 days. Currently, scientists are working to improve the growth of human cells in pig embryos, and there is hope that one day humans can benefit from this medical technology using chimeric pigs.

Link to news article:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mouse-cells-grown-rats-cure-diabetes-mice?mode=topic&context=87

Chimeric mouse embryo containing rat cells (shown in red)